You may have noticed my recent fascination with Storify :) I wanted to take a moment to reflect and explain my interest…
- In observing some powerful, genuinely speakers over the last month or two, I’ve noticed a common theme: the power of good storytelling.
- As my PLN continues to grow, I’ve thought a lot about filters: the importance of curation vs just collecting massive amount of information.
Last month, I began a unit focused on social networking with one of my classes. So I thought it would be the perfect opportunity for me to think about the above two points with my students. And to teach them some of what I’ve gained/learned in the past several months.
Storify was the perfect tool – curation meets storytelling with ease! I started by introducing my students to twitter, its uses beyond simply telling the world what you’re eating for dinner or what party you’re going to, and explaining the importance of using hashtags to organize conversations. We then turned to using Storify and I had the opportunity to explain embed code, how to copy an image URL vs copy an image, and we also played with the Storify Bookmarklet.
Since TED-Ed had just launched, I also was really curious to see how my students would receive these videos. So combining all of the above ideas, we played. Here are some examples that we came up with (these are the same projects that I posted previously):
After using Storify with my students, I decided that I wanted to try something similar. Regina Dugan recently gave a powerful TED talk. The lesson in the importance of refusing to fear failure really struck a chord with me. I decided to watch the talk and tweet some of my favorite quotes. I then searched out my tweets in Storify, rearranged them in the order that made sense (surprising to me, this was not in the same order the lines were delivered in the talk), added a couple of lines of text with my thoughts, and I had something that I will reference over and over. It was so simple to make — and being able to drag and drop to rearrange the order of my “story” was one of the best things about it. Because the pieces of my story ended up moving in a very different order than how they were originally recorded. My final product: Let’s Talk About Failure – My Takeaways from Regina Dugan’s #TED Talk.
The only thing that’s missing from Storify, at the moment, is a really good organization method (unless I’m missing something!). They do have a search feature, which is great, but I’d like to see some improvement here. Also, you can “like” stories, which makes them appear in your “likes” section, and that can be viewed by your subscribers. I think it would be neat to be able to have folders or some other organization feature here. Oh, and lastly, it works well with wordpress.com! There is an “export” feature, which enables you to embed your storify story in your wordpress blog. Played with that feature too :) Very simple and something I’ll definitely be using more in the future!
techieMusings 